Healthy Food and Drink

Lotus Fruit

For the modern Greeks, the lotus fruit may be the Japanese persimmon, which looks much like a large, smooth, hairless peach. I’ve seen it growing in gardens inside the province of Lakonia from the Peloponnese, Greece. Personally, I’m not keen on this particular lotus fruit, it’s dry leaving your mouth feeling as if it really needs water. It tastes a little like vanilla.

Having tasted this fruit it’s hard to believe it was this that so enthralled Odysseus with his fantastic crew of adventurers. Of course, it really is reasonable to suppose that the original Greek hero stayed all-around his homeland, but it really is unlikely, in the number of years it apparently took him to acquire home following Trojan war.

It is a bit more likely that she travelled to Asia and encountered the sacred lotus. The sacred lotus, so Homer wrote in Book 9 on the Odyssey, caused Odysseus and his awesome followers to your investment purpose of their journey, this is why some commentators have suggested which the lotus eaters partook with the opium poppy.

However, when you have a look at the seed pods you’ll see they resemble those with the opium poppy. Each pod holds about 24 seeds. In Cambodia, they’re valued like a very tasty snack!

The lotus plant can also be valued because of its medicinal properties, mainly because it contains nuciferine and aporphine, that are morphine-like substances. This indicates that this sleep of Lethe could be induced if your plant is ingested. No wonder Odysseus too so long for getting home.

Herodotus, the Father of History, thought how the lotus eaters were inhabitants in the Libyan coastal area. However, Herodotus might not be a trustworthy source. In the standard world eating the fruit from the lotus was considered to cause forgetfulness. Whether this is before or after Homer wrote the Odyssey is ready to accept question.

Perhaps the lotus eaters never really existed. However, they’ve already certainly captured the imaginations of generations. The English poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote a poem The Lotos – Eaters about them as well as the idea of them also captured Edith Wharton’s imagination. as you can seen in her novel, ‘The Age of Innocence’. Fans of Rick Riordan novels will doubtless can recall the theme in the Lotus Eaters in their ‘Camp Half-Blood Chronicles.’